The Complete Guide to&nbspReconversion

This post was promoted from YouMoz. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

A great deal of emphasis is placed on inbound marketing and attracting new customers. However, we should be careful not to neglect the existing clients that we may have. These people are just as important as new customers and more often than not can provide you with a great return of investment. We should give our existing clients the marketing focus they deserve.

In this guide, I will look at why remarketing and reconverting your clients can be a valuable tactic for your business, while also providing examples on how we can do just that.

I hope you find this guide to be something a little bit different than what we normally see on Moz and, most of all, I hope you find it useful. I’d love it if you could read through the whole post, but for those revisiting or those strapped for time, here are a few links to jump you to each chapter:

Prelude: What Prompted the Post

I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told. We don’t see an awful lot of in-house SEO perspectives here on SEOmoz and even less so from the financial services sector, of which my current role is in. This does give me the opportunity, however, to provide a real case study of how a company has identified the need to get more value from the client base and how they have done so.

Basically, our company provides a way for people to trade the financial markets, things like equities, currency pairs and so on. We provide this service in a number of countries across Europe, with the UK being our primary market.

The curious thing about this industry, over the last 6-12 months is that, while we as a company have acquired new clients somewhat exponentially, the trading volumes of those clients, effectively the amount that they have been trading, has not seen the same amount of growth. This is something that is reported to be affecting the industry as a whole.

There are likely a number of factors that are contributing to this. Market volatility as a whole is at a record low, while we are also reviewing our marketing channels to see which ones are providing the most worth to us. However, the thing that we felt we had most control over was ensuring that our clients were as happy as they could possibly be with us, which in turn would extend the time period they want to trade with us and would do so with more frequency.

This guide will aim to show what we have done as a company to help ensure our clients are satisfied with us and want to reconvert and how these methods can apply to a wide range of industries.

Chapter 1: I Demand Satisfaction

If you’re trying to get people to come back to your business and reconvert, they better have had a bloomin’ good experience the first time round. It goes without saying that people will need to have a positive experience with your company to even consider returning, regardless of whatever marketing campaign you are using to entice them back.

Therefore, the first part of any reconversion strategy is ensuring that the conversion the first time round is as smooth as possible. If you’re working on an ecommerce site, cart abandonment is always a hot topic and I really like Russ Henneberry’s guide on decreasing abandonment over on CrazyEgg.

The best way to know whether or not you are being well received is to have an open dialogue with your clients. SEOmoz is a great example of this, while at ETX Capital we always display a free contact number on our website, so that people only have to pick up the phone to talk with us. Being readily available on social media, particularly Twitter, is another great way to garner client feedback. Over 30% of top brands have launched a dedicated customer service handle and I’d advise you to check out the Simply Measured case study on brands’ Twitter activity.

You may also want to consider asking your clients to leave you their feedback on external review sites, such as Review Centre. Not only do you often get detailed feedback from people leaving reviews, your ranking here can help you obtain rich snippets in your PPC ads. If you receive over 30 reviews for your business and keep an average rating of 4 or more, you can have fancy, shmancy stars appear next to your ads like these:

Oh my God – it’s full of stars!

Finally, you definitely need to check out Joshua Unseth’s SEOmoz post on using Google Analytics for a Q&A strategy. Not only is it a brilliant resource, it can also help you discover what people are asking about your brand in Google search. You may find some trends on your service that you can address prior to people converting.

Chapter 2: Don’t Count Out a Discount

Source: NoSweatShakespeare.com

It might seem simple, but it is often effective. Offering discounts to returning customers is a great way to have them return and to build up a bit of brand loyalty. I can remember in November last year that I had a mullet to rival Billy Ray Cyrus and I decided that it was time for a smart cut. I went to Rush salon with no intention of returning for regular cuts, as I thought it was a bit pricey. One loyalty card stamp and two 25% off cuts later and I’m already looking forward to my next princess day!

Repeat customers very often cost less than acquiring new customers, so when you’re working out your margins and what discount you can afford to give, cost is definitely something you will want to consider.

Implementing the discount system is something that should not be underestimated either. For the ecommerce SEOs out there, you can find some very useful extensions for your CMS. OpenCart is arguably one of the best CMS systems out there right now and thesethreeextensions may be of interest for you.

Providing physical discounts is still a very popular method as well. Providing branded cards with a discount code is a popular trick used by Amazon, when sending out its products (I must have had £600 worth of wine vouchers sent to me in three months, what are they trying to say?). I have to say I am a fan of the loyalty stamp card and I’ve often wondered why more businesses do not employ an online solution to this. For all intents and purposes, the Tesco Clubcard is a loyalty card that stores your data online, allowing you to redeem points for discounts – perhaps this could be applicable to your business?

It looks as though that more companies are heading towards loyalty stamp apps, if sites such as Stampfeet and Stampme are anything to go by. This could also be a useful discount solution for you.

Gamification is not something to be underestimated either. We see a lot of gamification in the health industry – I’d love to see a gym take it one step further and have a workout leader board. When you join the gym, you would be given a chip that logs all of your exercise on the machines. The people who run the most miles, burn the most calories, generate the most watts and so on would be given discounted membership for 1/3/6 months. It would offer an incentive for people to exercise harder, which can only be a good thing, while giving the gym some really positive PR.

Chapter 3: The Best Things in Life are Free

The Fandom of the Oprah is plain to see

Everyone loves free stuff, am I right? But how does giving stuff away for free translate into returning customers?

Remember, this is all about building brand loyalty and a satisfied consumer base. If you can achieve that, not only might customers be more inclined to use your services again, but happy customers may refer their friends to your business as well. Repeat customers can be walking billboards for business.

Having said that, it would be wise to plan your giveaway so that you can gain something else as well, in case the reconversions don’t come. Let me use an example of a recent contest we held on our Facebook page.

We recently offered some trading credit to our clients if they could correctly guess the US employment report, also known as the non-farm payrolls, at the start of the month. The ultimate aim was to reignite interest in trading and to see an increase in trading volumes, but we knew that we could also see the following benefits, if planned correctly:

An increase in ‘likes’ on our page.

An increase in engagement on other posts.

An increase in traffic and conversions, assisted or otherwise.

Because of the potential multi-benefits, we were happy to go ahead with the giveaway and I’d recommend that people look for similar multi-level benefits before parting with their product or service for nothing.

After contacting our existing clients by email on the day that the contest went live, as well as previewing the contest earlier in the week via our social media channels, we ended up seeing some great results. The ‘likes’ on our page increased substantially, analytics is reporting an increase in assisted Facebook conversions that week and we’ve also been seeing some increased engagement on our regular market updates, which is great to see. Having this open communication with our clients allows us to keep in touch with their wants and needs.

The icing on the cake is that we have also seen increased trading volumes in the days and weeks since the competition was launched. Without giving away too much sensitive information, I think it would be safe to say our initial outlay in terms of cost has been recuperated and then some.

Chapter 4: The Lost Art of Email Marketing

Source: poofytoo.tumblr.com

According to the DMA 2012 conference, for every $1 spent on email marketing $40.56 is returned (The Email Marketing Trend Slideshare from Silverpop is a great read, if you’ve not seen it already). It surprises me that we don’t see it mentioned more often here, as it can be a great way of getting your clients to reconvert.

Many of the previous tips I have mentioned in this post have been used emails in order to generate interest, such as contacting our client base to alert them about the Facebook contest we were running. That’s not really marketing, but it is an indication that email is still one of the best ways to communicate with your customers.

Email marketing is a great way of interacting with your inactive user base and get them reconverting. There is a great CNET case study on Marketing Sherpa that looks at how offering incentives can get people to reconvert. The key takeaways are making sure that you:

Accurately segment your lists – ie knowing what group has been inactive for 60-120 days, which clients have been inactive for 120+ and so on.

Come up with a number of engagement tactics to test.

Identify with your team what constitutes as reactivation or reconversion.

If you’re using a decent CRM system, you will be able to track user activity, or lack thereof, in a lot of detail, such as date of last login, recent transactions etc. Using this data, you can segment your users how you want and can judge for yourself what classifies as an inactive user, for example. We use SalesForce for this purpose, but different size businesses may find better solutions elsewhere, so it is worth researching. PC World has featured five useful CRMs for small businesses in the past.

The above CNET case study makes for a great read and I think an email marketing campaign can be taken one step further by running a Facebook custom audience campaign. There is an excellent SEOmoz blog post on this topic that you should definitely check out, with one of the key highlights of custom audiences being that you can import and target people from your email list only. This obviously relies on a person using the same email for Facebook as they did with your website, but there’s a fairly decent chance that they would have. With this level of targeting, you can serve them relevant ads to supplement your email campaign, without breaking the budget.

If you’re looking to learn more about email marketing, the Aweber and Deliverability blogs are great places to start, while the email marketing whitepaper from MailChimp is a great free resource as well.

Chapter 5: Community is Key

Erm...probably not this Community

Community managers: rejoice! This chapter celebrates you and all the things that you do.

This is arguably the most important section of the guide. Nurturing your community is essential for reconversion, which is something that I have alluded to throughout this guide. The better the experience a customer has with your site, the more likely there are to return, reconvert and refer.

Remember, your community is most likely an open forum and not just the people who have used, worked with or are associated with your online business. This means that you need to create a positive community for people pre-conversion as much as you need to create a positive one for post-conversion folks.

Having high quality engagements with your community is one of the most direct ways of catering to their needs. Social media is an obvious outlet for this, but sometimes it can be hard to work out which social media channel would be best, both for levels of engagement and also for usability reasons. We have already talked about how customer service handles on Twitter can offer a direct response channel, but LinkedIn is often overlooked.

Linkedin discussion groups can be a great place to engage with your community, whether it’s in your own group or joining in the discussion elsewhere. More often than not, when you’re providing and contributing to useful discussions on LinkedIn, you are not just helping your community, but also your unaided brand awareness. One of the most famous examples of a big brand using LinkedIn is Hewlett Packard.

That is a summary of the HP case study provided by LinkedIn, which you can read in full here: http://marketing.linkedin.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/LinkedIn_HPUKCaseStudy2011.pdf. HP identified that their community and the demographic that they wanted to target were present on LinkedIn and so created a non-branded, general small business discussion group that allowed users to help one another out. Despite it being non-promotional, HP saw great results as a result of unaided brand awareness and the work that they had put into the community.

Hosting discussions such as these on LinkedIn brings with it an element of trust, as it is being hosted on a website people can trust and they would probably be more inclined to engage on than perhaps your own hosted forum. Furthermore, the benefit of being able to connect with users very quickly is a very valuable one, particularly when you bear in mind that HubSpot has reported that LinkedIn is up to 277% more effective at lead generation than other social networks.

It is worth noting that setting up a LinkedIn discussion group will be a time-consuming task. Moderation and encouraging engagement can take its time, so be sure that you can commit the human resource to the project in order to help it be as good as you want it to be. There’s a great resource on social media examiner on how to build a thriving LinkedIn group, while HubSpot also provides some useful tips on how to manage groups.

Alternatively, Google+ is well on its way to matching and possibly succeeding LinkedIn as the discussion group king. Google+ communities work very much in the same manner as LinkedIn discussion groups, with the added benefit that they are arguably more visible to people surfing the net. For some industries, there is already a thriving presence on the network, with SEO being chief among them. The Google Authorship community is probably the stand out example (and you should definitely check it out if you have not done so already). It would be tough work to host discussion groups on both networks with limited resources, so it is worthwhile dipping your feet in some already existing groups in your industry to see whether or not there is an appetite for what you want to discuss.

It is a good idea to find communities in your industry that are not based on one of the big social media websites. There is a forum called Trade2Win that is extremely targeted to our audience and it serves as a great resource to them. We try to engage with our audience there as well, in order to let them know about any of our new developments and for them to also offer feedback and ask questions about our service. It can be a very open and frank discussion at times, but you have to respect with communities like these that you, as a brand rather than a consumer, are on ‘their turf’ as it were, and so you should treat it with the utmost respect. The one thing about engaging on a forum that you do not control of is that you are potentially open to attack, with no way of removing slander unless the forum master deems to do so. With that in mind, it is important that you establish a clear social media policy within your organisation before you engage, with clear rules of engagement for how to handle certain kinds of negative engagement.

Of course, nurturing your community is not exclusively an online pursuit.

There are many great things that a business can do to connect with their community offline. In London, where I am based, there is a relatively new artisan bakery called Gail’s. Their mission statement is to not only provide the best quality bakery products out there, but to also become integrated within their local communities. They do this by customising what products they stock in each store, for example in the region of Hampstead, where there is a large Jewish community; the store stocks more rye bread goods, among others.

Gail’s goes one step further than this and also holds community events in each store. Some events include book-reading clubs for their store based adjacent to a primary school, so that families can come after school and enjoy themselves. The Hampstead store also organises a garden party each year, where they invite businesses that offer local produce to set up market stalls across the high street and invite people to come and sample some tasty food. Both of these events are not designed to generate profit, but to increase the brand awareness of Gail’s and to also give back to the community that they are integrated in.

Incidentally, I don’t have much need for Gail’s anymore, as I’ve taken to making my own bread!

Note: Pacman Onesie not obligatory

There’s method in my madness: can you imagine if Gail’s asked people to post pictures of their loaves and funny bakes on their Facebook page, with the entrants getting discounts or even free items? That would be a prime example of a company engaging with its community online and to help them reconvert.

If you’re looking for more community ideas, you should look no further than the folks here at SEOmoz. They do a great job at engaging with their community. Just this week I was sent this swag from the team:

The slap-wrist has brought me much joy and my office much annoyance.

Conclusion: Let’s Get Out There

I hope this guide has inspired you to look at fun and engaging ways to spark reconversion. Let your customers know you love them and they’ll surely love you back!

I’d love to get some feedback from you in the comments below, as well as some cool stories about how you have worked on reconversions and building up your lovely communities.

About TomRayner —
When I’m not stuffing my face with Skittles, I can be found contributing on the Moz Q&A, and on Twitter. I’d love to connect with you there!

Its very important to be trustworthy, authoritative and credible to build a great brand. Its always important to feed informative content consistently in a creative and an easily understandable way to the users. Ex: Hubspot and Kissmetrics are the brands which are mostly recognized by people for the content they produce. Its very important to be socially active to be a recognizable and much talked about brand in the niche.

This is a great read, thank you :) So many companies negelct their 'bread and butter' customers in favour of the fervent search for new ones. I love the community element as you are combining the two and often sharing a 'feel good' factor too.

Tom, your post is not just informative, it's greatly entertaining!
Thanks for putting so much of your expertise into creating it.

I
do agree on the point of discounts - one should never underestimate
their power and effectiveness to trigger demand :) But speaking about
businesses like online pizza booking - they must be 100% prepared to
deliver to everyone who orders. There was a recently a case, when one
such biz sent out thousands of messages offering the 30% discount, but
they were not ready for the load of orders. As a result, many customers
complained about late delivery and poor quality (so much work for the
company's social media manager!).

That's a very good point Iness and one everyone should take heed from - working out acceptable margins for discounts should always factor in some volatility in the way of returns.

I was speaking to a friend who knows someone working at a very (very) big electrical retailer. Their profit margin for 3 and 4 figure products is 2%. Just 2%! Profit is made in other aspects of the business, but those aspects rely on these products getting out there to the general public and with their B2B links.

Any sort of discount on margins that small is going to occur a lost and that's before you factor in factors like warranties, damage on delivery and faulty product lines - which can be rife with electrical goods.

It sounds pessimistic, but sometimes it really is a good idea to "budget for the worst" if you're thinking of going down the discount route.

Having experience as an in house to an Asset Management company, I can very well understand the risks, issues, and blockers that at times add delays and prevent from having quick turn around on the SEO and SMM deliverable. Since you are dealing with investors monies, financial advisers and regulated financial instruments, its very important that every single engagement with customers, especially be it Product level or Service level discussion, is compliant to the market regulations and company policies.

All of your points above are valid in case of a FS platform!Just one more point I'd like to add - Having a Mobile Site/Application is a good way to get some repeat business from existing customers. It facilitates existing customers to check their portfolio on the run and also place fresh deals without having to get back to the laptop.Thanks again for a great post!KAS

We work on an 80/20 rule. 80% of our business comes from 20% of our existing clients. We know who they are and try to add value to their business at all time to continue sales.That 20% is the most valuable thing to our business, it's what keeps us going and also brings in new business through recommendations.

Anyone who's game for giving the world a peek at their personal-pacman-gear-moment, even if the Loaf is the supposed star of the shot, is a daring gentleman, indeedy.

But seriously, thanks for the great article.

The concept alone is a great reminder. I agree that we tend to forget our longtime, loyal and true in favor of the bright, shiny newcomers we can pull in. We get carried away with trying to attract the fancy new clients and bypass the familiar. We're committed to delivering beyond the typical happy, satisfied customer experience and put our hearts and souls into it and then we're done and we fail to keep in touch unless they keep in touch with us. How silly.

And also, ironically, those repeat clients are often the ones who pull us through the hard times, the slow times- those ones who keep coming back. We love them!

From time to time, I think: "Oh, I should go down some lists and get in touch with the folks we haven't heard from lately, see what they're up to". And then the bustling train rushes me past the list in a blur.

As a local company with a brochure website, I read the article mainly from that point of view. But all your down on the ground tips are very useful and I'll be sure to recommend to clients and re-purpose for ourselves wherever possible.

Awesome Tom. First of all I would love to give you props for all your Geeky references. Too bad Futurama is canceled now. This was a great article to read, you did a great job. It's so true people love free stuff, but how often would you say would be good to give free stuff out. Should you have a monthly, yearly, or daily thing? I would love to get your perspective on this. I love free stuff and would love to get free stuff daily, but is that the best thing for your company? Or do you space it out more? PS I want a free swag bag from SEOmozGreat job, keep up the good work.

Hey John, thank you for the kind words. Futurama has been cancelled so many times now I've lost count, wouldn't be surprised if it makes a comeback!

Regarding free stuff and giveaways - obviously cost should be your primary concern here. Only give away an amount and a frequency that you are happy to part with. If you budget it in for the first 5 giveaways that the money is lost and not recouped in any way from subsequent reconversions, you're taking a conservative approach that won't land you in trouble. Once you've done it 5 times you can review and see how many extra conversions it generated and factor that in to your cost and ROI.

In terms of frequency, I think "burnout" is a legitimate concern. We all love free stuff, but daily free giveaways to me begin to take away the charm and the impact of the event. In the worse case scenario, it could even look spammy - just think about emails you get promising free stuff everyday. It's not always well received and it can have some negative connotations on your brand.

By in large your client base will dictate to you how often they want these things. So for the financial company and the facebook page, we've got a lot of positive feedback and excitement over the weekly contests (which don't always result in a giveaway) - the routine of it has got people eagerly waiting until Tuesday comes around.

Totally agree with your Trade2Win example. I think it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that social media = Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Google+ and to forget about everything else. But finding a targeted, specific, niche site related to your business and getting known on there (in the right way) can be a little goldmine.

In some ways, Reddit can be seen in the same way as the Trade2Win example, as you're venturing into someone else's turf. We've seen companies and businesses fall flat on their face trying to integrate into that community (/r/hailcorporate, anyone?) whereas those that have made a conscious effort to help and add value to the community have flourished.

Hey Tom,Completely agree with your focus on community. Nurturing a good community not only results in reconversions but keeps a brand's social media presence vibrant and can help attract new customers (and defend a brand in times of crisis). The only issue I have is with Facebook competitions. I've steered clear of using them since Facebook's terms and conditions for promotions don't really allow for the types of competitions you describe (I know everyone does them anyway, but I like to play by the rules) without using an app:

i. Promotions on Facebook must be administered within Apps on Facebook.com, either on a Canvas Page or a Page App.

ii. Promotions on Facebook must include the following:

a. A complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant.

b. Acknowledgment that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.

c. Disclosure that the participant is providing information to [disclose recipient(s) of information] and not to Facebook.

iii. You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or connecting to your app. For example, you must not condition registration or entry upon the user liking a Wall post, or commenting or uploading a photo on a Wall.

iv. You must not use Facebook features or functionality as a promotion’s registration or entry mechanism. For example, the act of liking a Page or checking in to a Place cannot automatically register or enter a promotion participant.

v. You must not use Facebook features or functionality, such as the Like button, as a voting mechanism for a promotion.vi. You must not notify winners through Facebook, such as through Facebook messages, chat, or posts on profiles (timelines) or Pages.

It's a shame, but competitions on Facebook aren't as simple for the brand or the customer since these rules came in a couple of years ago. I've used apps like Wildfire before but it puts an extra step into the process and you end up with less engagement (and have to pay for the app or build your own). I suggest that clients run competitions on their website and then market them on social channels. What are your thoughts on the FB T&Cs?

Its true cost of acquiring old customers is less but before giving discounts, or free stuff it is very important for business owners to do RFM(recency, frequency, monetary) analysis.

RFM analysis is a marketing technique used to determine quantitatively which customers are the best ones by examining how recently a customer has purchased (recency), how often they purchase (frequency), and how much the customer spends (monetary).

Great Post. Re Social Media Conversion and SEO strategies. Yes Google+, Facebook and Twitter are powerful. However, many SEOs focus just on that. I thinks it is more important to focus on great content and gain organic links from sites that are a authority in once field. Quality will beat quantity anytime. Greetings from München, (Munich) Germany

Perfect suggestions, which can really helps to keep the existing clients cherished and more connected with a firm. I was having few uncleared concepts on which it seems difficult to act upon when it come to create the same services and deals like fresh flavored apple pie. Grateful to you Tom for wonderful sharing with remarkable details. :)

Hi Tom, some great advice there. Always good to hear from the in-house SEO perspective.I particularly liked hearing about the competition, which in financials and B2B can be an awkward fit. I'd love to see the messaging you went with for that. Cheers!

Glad you enjoyed the article. I know exactly what you mean about financials and B2B sometimes having an awkward time with their social media messaging.

Many of the principles of what I believe to be "good" social media engagement apply to all verticals. If you can make your engagement personalised, approachable and above all else not patronising, I think it will work.

This is exactly what we did with our Facebook contest. It's a financial business sure, but it still has an identity and a personality - we shouldn't be afraid to express ourselves. Financials here in the UK are strictly regulated by what they can and cannot say by the FSA/FCA, but with what they can say they should make it compelling.

For instance, we made a point of saying that when we engage on social media, we should refer to ourselves in personal pronouns, such as I and We. It's a small thing, but it creates the habit of showing that there's an approachable person behind the social media profile. Social media is all about personal connections and if we both agree that financials and B2B have a hard time connecting on this personal level, then it's little examples like the pronouns that can help towards bridging the gap.

Although I have to say that I am not a fan of the punch card systems I have to say that they are very effective. I can never keep track of those cards long enough to reap the benefits...which is mainly the reason they are so effective. Its all about the perceived reward.

I really liked the article, but am more concerned about the current world wide availability of adult sized Pac-Man Snuggies. The shortage could be the tipping point...but I digress. I liked your article it mixed humor with some practical tips.